sascom voices - The sascom magazine blog

"Chris Bowman, retired Superintendent, Lafourche Parish School Board, coined a new favorite term, 'data whisperer.' All enjoyed his color commentary."

You are most kind! Incidentally, as one “data whisperer” to another, I had a blast. And I have also gotten a lot of mileage out of my comment about how text analytics brings humanity to statistics. My other comment asking, "Would you take a chance on a lottery ticket if I told you there was an 85% of winning," seemed to resonate with people who wonder how you handle the criticism about absolute accuracy. I always thought that 85% trumped ZERO PERCENT. What would you do if a doctor told you had an 85% chance of survival if you got a specific treatment for some dreaded disease? Would you do what he said to do? The answer is unequivocally yes.

This was my fourth trip to that conference and to the users’ panel. I got there years ago when I called to attend, and I told the conference organizer what I did. He thought it was so weird he asked me if I would be on the panel then, and I have been there ever since. I have been to a few education conferences during that four years, and I have never met anybody who analyzed what I analyzed. The interesting part is that I can barely get anyone to talk to me about this or show the least bit of interest. I have often thought that public school systems collect everything and analyze nothing. God knows we need it with the way school systems are pressured today to produce. I also think that the business world is not there yet either except for some firms or industries.

One reason why I like that conference so much is because it is usually populated by extremely smart and passionate people. Though some of it goes over my head, I love to hear about cutting edge stuff. I am amazed at how quickly things change. Last year blogs were hot and now passé because it’s a given that you check them out.

I regret not hearing more about fraud detection. I believe that will grow. There was someone there who works for a legal group learning about that topic. I talked to her on the first day. We talked about ediscovery and Enron. I can only imagine that subprime mortgages, credit default swaps, derivatives, and Wall Street will get the same kind of scrutiny. Several years before this crisis, I read a lengthy piece in the Economist about this. It detailed everything in a frightening prediction that has since come true. If I were in a law firm, text analytics would be my middle name.

Now, let’s move on to sentiment analysis. This has got to grow by leaps and bounds. I did a survey when I was the superintendent about the voice of the employee. One of the things that bothered them was how their checks usually had some type of payroll error. You could also feel the anger and the animosity drip from the page as you read what the respondent had written. Negative words and red highlights dotted the data. Sentiment analysis is not there yet because humor, sarcasm, and irony are hard to identify; however, I learned something about computers over the years. Anything that is impossible is usually done in eighteen months in California. As a novice, generic human being, I find it incredible that text analysis is so far along.

If anyone is even remotely interested in text, this conference is the place to be.